


As Autumn or Darkness

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Festival of the Lost, No Plot/Plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 21:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: It's easier for Eris to mourn the lost when one of the lost is here with her, half-alive, even if Toland's comforts are as cryptic as his songs.





	

**Author's Note:**

> (A non-frightening FotL fic, posted here mostly so that I have it archived.)

Dry orange leaves on the tiny windowsill, cold wind, a brown moth crawling in the predawn. Eris Morn wakes up smelling ozone and leaf-litter. Festival of the Lost: the time when the broken are so close they can almost be seen, when the dead walk beside the dead on the edges of the towers.

She is surrounded by memory now, clotted with it, half-asleep in the haze. A fall of blue-black shadow might be Eriana sitting on the edge of the bed; the smell of the crushed leaves might be Sai. Eris turns over and relaxes, the shift of the taut skin on her forehead a sudden pull.

The cell, big enough for a bed and a desk and cabinets but close and indistinct in the cold, blurs toward day-blindness as the light filters in. Oh, how sharp-edged everything had been in the dark! Toland is a shadow beside her. 

Fear like acid trickles down her throat, replacing the walls with the slime-slick green of the pit, but the white walls and the quiet in the back of her mind tells her that they are not underground.

She presses her arm underneath his and her forehead against his shoulder, a gentle, grumbly push for space on the narrow cot.

Her startle makes Toland flinch and tuck his face into his own elbow, but he doesn’t look up. There’s a wash of something like void-light, some radar black and creeping, and he is reassured. When she pulls both woven blankets over her face she can see more clearly and reject the cold morning, and take stock.

One Tower, heading toward winter. The drop centimeters from her shoulder is not a cliff, but the edge of the cot. She has food and research in boxes of her own. She has a musty room of her own with a locked door and a window left unlatched. There are threats lurking around the edges of the Guardians’ curious young territories. In the basket, not raisins this year - shriveled dates.

One refugee from the throneworlds, who escaped or was permitted to haunt her.

Eris accepts these odds with a Hunter’s carefully calculated gambling spirit.

The room smells like oncoming snow and crushed leaves and ozone. Beneath it, probably the smell anyone else would notice first: the sour undertone of grafted Hive skin. Toland looks human, most of the time, but every few breaths he blurs at the edges like a fading signal, and when he does the ozone smell grows sharper.

His back still to her, Toland mutters something irritable into the thin pillow. She catches “…corporeal … sun.”

“Cold, love?” Eris whispers.  “It has always been dark and cold.” Has it been? She’s still half-asleep, but Eris isn’t seeing shadows any more. The impression of Eriana is gone, only a pleasant memory left. When she edges above the blanket the world is a dark blur, Toland barely discernible from the wall close behind him. She ducks under again and enjoys the warmth of her own breath.

She’s drifting again when he turns to face her, so that the prickling, half-real texture of his skin is dreamlike and layered. The Hive eyes set into his pale skin are terror and comfort at once, so she takes his hand in both of hers and presses the knuckles against her mouth. They speak this language of acceptance and possession fluently.

Her head is still against his warm shoulder, both of them heavy with sleep, so it takes two heartbeats for her to realize that he is looking at her bared eyes.

The veil, tied tightly at the back of her head, had fallen some time during the night. She remembers that now, but it warmed to her skin and bunched up around her nose. She is used to the weeping ichor dripping into her mouth, and the heavy, wet cloth is little different. It is almost part of her.

That’s why, Eris thinks for a moment, terribly and partially true, she doesn’t want him to touch her eyes. She is rotting and he is not. It is much more than that (she does not want to see him believe that he has earned something), but for a moment there isn’t. She has left life behind, and people like Ikora and Amanda help her touch it, but her Ghost still remains on the list of the dead.

And Toland does love seeing how things crumble.

He is perfectly still now, three eyes wide, his lips parted. Embarrassed or enthralled or impressed by her or his own work. He has stopped breathing. She pushes their twined hands against his chest, reminding him of his own physical presence. He has not touched the scarred and scaled ruin of her forehead since the pit.

Slowly, she disentangles her hands from his, and sits up. (Cold, dark, her legs still warm, suggestions of light and force in the distance as Guardians rouse for the morning.) With both hands, she works the gauze up off of her nose and smooths it back over her eyes and around her forehead, moving aside her stringy hair and avoiding the tiny, sharp horns. Out of sight beside her, Toland tenses, catches a shallow breath.

“No,” she says, looking at the lump of blankets over her knees. “Not yet.” 

* * *

 

Festival of the Lost: the time when the stitches between worlds seem to come loose, when things are out of place. Eris did not like that the Guardians’ behavior was more erratic than usual. With every footstep she tensed a bit more, bent a bit more as if to protect the ball of light in her hands. Rustling leaves sounded like sliding, picked-clean bones.

And so, the previous day on the Concourse, Eris had already been tired and distant when Amanda ran down the stairs.

“Wait!” Amanda flew toward Shaxx, spitting sparks. The Guardian she had been looking for was talking about a match with the Crucible master. Eris turned away while Amanda caught up with them, said something urgent about ships. In the end Amanda and the Guardian nodded at one another congenially, agreed on the deal they had made and now more clear on its parameters. Eris considered the nature of bargains.

Bargains in blood, she thought. Not many other kinds are kept, ultimately. People interpret them different ways and bring different ideas with them, and one person’s victory is another’s loss. The battlefield was simpler, though: either you won or you lost, and the Hive were right about that, for all of their horror. They must not be allowed to win, but they defined the nature of winning. Amanda’s definitions might be different. They might be down to speed, to timing, to red lights and green. This race would have an ending.

In this way, Eris came around to the realization that Amanda was standing nearby, her arms crossed.

“Hey,” said the shipwright. “How’s it going today?”

Eris cocked her head. The green light in her hands swayed as if in a current, so she swayed too, to keep from becoming dizzy as her eyes tried to track it. ”It will soon be over. One way or another.”

“Well, all right,” Amanda drawled. “What will, do you think?”

Eris could not explain to Amanda her ideas about the Sparrow races and the Hive, not directly. “You ask for speed.”

“Well, yeah, and reliability, and whatnot. I think you need some extra talking to during the Festival, Eris. Everything all right?”

“All is dark … except for the songs.”

“Hmm.” Amanda re-crossed her arms, showing no intent of leaving. “I wanted to tell you somethin’, Eris. Might seem strange but there’s no better time for it before the crowds at the Festival tomorrow. You ever wonder about the monsters that aren’t real?”

Eris was concerned enough with real monsters and did not answer.

“Don’t think anyone trusted the stars before, either,” Amanda said. “When we got to the City we’d been refugees for years.  We knew there were more monsters out there than Guardians fought. My mom taught me about great apes and dragons and all these things we’ve never seen. You ever think about that?”

Eris considered, but whenever she cast her imagination out into the dark there was only the Hive. Had she and Toland ever told one another stories, in the pit? There had been poetry and the language of gesture and knife, but those were all real. Sometimes, his words had seemed fantastical. Sometimes, she had thought of the Tower as a legend. “The dark is fecund. Maybe there are beasts there we have not seen.”

Amanda nodded her head. “All right, all right. You ever scared of things that ain’t real coming true?”

Eris thought about Savathun, about proofs of logic, and did not have enough left for fantasy. Death had been a fantasy, once. Then Mare Imbrium had happened and so many dead, last-dead, the Light sucked out of them. She had known that it could happen, but only intellectually; seeing it was something different. Living it was something different.

“There were things that took my Ghost,” Eris said. “Those were the beasts.”

Amanda laughed, bitter but full-throated.  “Could light a candle for that too.”

“I do not wish to remember!”

“All right. Look, I’ll bring you some candy tomorrow.”

Eris bared her teeth. Mouth-rot would not save them, and Amanda had revealed too much about herself. Too much fear. _Stand strong, Shipwright,_ Eris wanted to say, but the memory of last year’s Festival candy made her broken teeth hurt, and Amanda was not making the kind of bargain to which Eris was accustomed any more.

As soon as the Shipwright walked away, light on her mismatched feet, Eris whispered, “Thank you.” 

* * *

 

On the next morning, Toland acquiesces lazily to her denial and lays back, stretching, showing his throat like a taunt.

“Dearest Eris.” His voice is a scrape of bone against glass, ugly and jagged. _Traveler_ , though, she trusts him. He will always squirm and conspire, but the reason for which he does it is so simple, and that is why she trusts it. Sword-logic runs and he pursues, but he has been happy so far to chronicle victory more than cause it. 

“I returned on the eve of the night of memory. Funny. Do the Guardians celebrate their own defeats? Is each death its own loss? We are all an army of the dead.”

Eris shivers, turns away into the fog of her morning-sun room and then back. She feels comfortably surrounded by him, by the bed, the blankets, the cold. “The festivities are empty. Guardians’ memories are fickle, but … I must trust them.”

“Some of them are powerful!” Toland crows. “Proud young warriors, your Guardians.”

She watches him blink, the eyes laboriously dimming. His admiration, she thinks, is sincere. He is a comfort, both because he is here and because he is not somewhere else, making mischief. “They can be frivolous,” she says. “But each one is so different. They use weapons the full import of which they do not understand.”

Toland half-smiles. “Are you not proud of the laborious experimentation? Some find my arcana useful, as burdened as I was to deliver it. Blinded, they still tithe! It is such reckless adherence to a system of which they understand a fraction.”

“We have discussed the Court.”

“And?”

“The Guardians must learn what they face,” Eris says.

“Ah. Your king-killers? I think they already know.”

“They have the sword. Ikora thinks they can be trusted with it. I took the crystal in my own hands and did the queen’s bidding.” As she thinks about it, she feels the burden again.

“Your queen,” Toland mutters.

“Our plan. Our brush with terror.” She will not tell him everything, but he felt the absence of the crystal months ago.

“Draw close, now.” His voice is so quiet that she barely hears him, but he’s holding the edge of one of the blankets, offering it to her. Instead of covering her eyes again she draws it to her chin and lays down, leaning against him, meeting his eyes.

He whispers again, and she can’t quite catch the words. The tone is proud, but exhausted. It’s half out of irritation that she kisses him, to get him to talk, to draw out his voice. She is still morning-muddled, but awakened to come to the defense of her Guardians. One kiss for the deep breath he takes and one again after he licks ichor off the side of her mouth. His mouth is as half-real as the rest of him, but he slides one flickering, void-black hand across the small of her back and she shakes.

When he speaks again the words are even more accented, panting at first, then clearer than before. His voice strengthens on the names of his enemies. “Yes. Let me tell you why you should not fear Willbreaker, the sword of Oryx.”

He speaks and she listens and refutes. She has heard these words before. There are whispered arguments. At last she gestures him close against her and kneads his shoulder with one hand, pushes on the back of his head with the other so that he is speaking against her throat. The long shattering-scar across his neck is pale against her grayed skin.

“To be taken in Willbreaker’s grasp is to know true bliss,” he says, his eyes shut, exultant, thinking it the pronouncement of his victory. “That is, to be simplified; that is, to be reduced to one’s most basic level, shedding all higher-order thoughts of fear or duty or selfishness.”

Eris understands simplicity. Either one survives or one does not.

When Toland speaks of pain she presses her nails against his back and he clings to her. “Now. do you see?” He rasps. “Now do you understand what you’ve done?” 

* * *

 

It was no surprise that he appeared in the evening. Last year he waited on his knees in the dark; this year he was walking on a balcony before the candles had been toted out, reveling in his own chained silence, carrying tendrils of wormspore upside-down in careless hands. She snatched him by the wrist, hissed to him that his presence wasn’t a secret any more. He gathered up the bouquet smoothly.

Were his trips to the Tower ever meant to be a secret? He replied, snide, disdainful. He had appeared before the Vanguard and practically trumpeted his intention to recruit Eris to his cause, last time. The law of exile, they reminded him, had never been rescinded.

In her cell he talked to her about green-black skies and machinations, words become fact, all of it alien but abiding by the logic that tugged at her, looked to blind eyes like empty fields and a range and a knife. He told her of dynasties he would chronicle and speak into existence and burn down for her. She opened the window when night fell and the air grew close. He said nothing of the Guardians, nothing of the Festival, nothing of the preparations, because they were not of his world any more.

It was because of this as much as anything else that she left him slip the gloves off her hands, his awed gaze locked on her grayed skin. He waited for her to turn her hand over before he brushed his lips against her palm. He had nothing to do with the Tower, and so neither did she when she pressed clawed fingers against his cheek. They talked for the sake of the sounds of their voices, but didn’t say much.

* * *

 

In the morning, Eris is proud that her own voice doesn’t break. “Still, we will fight.”

Toland changes from mad proselyte to exhausted scholar in a slump-shouldered surrender, burying his face against her shoulder. “Yes. We will speak that language.”

They’re close enough to be clammy, now, her scarred knees against his half-real legs. She doesn’t know why he would be warm; some kind of energy process other than biology, she is sure, the waves of the universe lapping up against the shore of something else and spitting electric heat. Nevertheless, they hold one another. The ghost of a Warlock bond glows on his arm like a brand. The morning grows late enough for the light to be insistent.

“It is a day to mourn the ones we lost,” Toland mutters. Eris knows that the Vanguard will expect her to be present later in the day, and she does not plan to shirk that duty.

“It gets better,” she says, and then her most horrible truth. “Sometimes I forget the years. Sometimes, I do not wish to forget their names.”

Toland is silent, and this encourages Eris to say more. “But we must remember. We are all that is left. The Guardians call out and they do not know when they say Eriana’s name but they are saying it to the universe and the universe tolls…”

He circles his thumb against her cheek, spreading the ichor.

Her Ghost still remains on the list of the dead, and should she chant that as well? Should she chant _Eris, Eris, the dead planet?_ She shivers.

“No,” she says. “We will all remember.”

“And when you are done…Your name will be with them,” Toland says, and touches her hair. He looks tired now, loose-limbed, awed. “The rocks of Pluto and Charon scream it. The sun reaches out for Eris, Eris…”

“A day to mourn the lost,” she insists.  

“I was under the impression that I was doing the same for you.”

She looks at him, tracing the familiar shape of his mouth before he flickers and grows too many teeth.

Leaves rattle into the room and she thinks about Amanda’s invented beasts and about how the Guardians do mourn her. She takes Toland’s hand and guides it to the veil.


End file.
